


Disintegrate || a FNaF fanfiction

by RefugeeofTumblr



Category: Five Nights at Freddy's
Genre: Death Threats, M/M, Near Death Experiences, Originally Posted on Tumblr
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-26
Updated: 2017-06-11
Packaged: 2018-09-12 11:50:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9070408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RefugeeofTumblr/pseuds/RefugeeofTumblr
Summary: Dan never expected to come face-to-face with something like this. When he does, it changes his life. Rating and tags subject to change. Check tags before reading. Enjoy!





	1. Introductions

He doesn’t know why he took this job. Money, of course. Somehow that logic seems less comforting than it did during the light of day, as he flips rapidly between system diagnostics and camera systems. Grainy images flicker to life in horrifying detail on the screen.

Okay, where is it? Where the hell did it go? Room 10, nothing. Room 9, nothing. Room… OH, HOLY SHIT, there it is!

Dan’s breath catches at the sight. The massive, hulking shape is silhouetted in full against the hallway’s length, wires sticking out of holes in patchy yellow fabric that hasn’t been mended in ages. One of its long rabbit ears has been broken in half, and it stares deep into the camera as it advances.

 **Springtrap**. Or, as those stupid cheery training videos from the old location called it, ‘Spring Bonnie’. The worst thing is that Dan knows why it acts so calculating, so **human**.

It’s more than a machine. It was meant to be switched into suit mode and worn, if an employee wanted to do so. But the springlocks which kept the animatronic parts out of the way were too finicky. Springtrap. And an employee must have died in this thing, because Dan’s intuition screams at him. **There’s still a person inside that thing**. At least, what remains of a person after they’ve had animatronic parts slam back into place around their whole body.

A strange swirling quality to the air alerts Dan to the fact that a ventilation error has occurred.

“Shit,” he mumbles, trying to fumble his way to the reset button. “Shit, shit, shit, I don’t have time for this.”

As the black spots clouding his vision recede, a shadow falls over him.

“No,” a broken, rasping voice agrees. “You don’t.”

Dan looks up, heart leaping into his throat. The thing - Springtrap - is standing right over him. Camera video feeds don’t do the thing justice at all. It stands at least seven feet tall, maybe even more, and the broken leer of its too-regular teeth is horrifying to see.

“Oh, god. Please, please don’t kill me. I’m just trying to get enough money to feed my baby girl.”

The mangled hand that’s reaching for his throat pauses. Dan didn’t even know the thing’s eyes could narrow, but they do.

“You have… family?” The thing rasps. Dan thinks it’s a question, but it’s difficult to tell when the thing’s warped voice box doesn’t seem to be able to produce anything but a hair-raising monotone.

Heart still hammering, Dan nods. He tugs his phone out of his back pocket.

Delilah is his moon and stars, the sun in his daytime skies. She’s such a sweet little girl. Skin like a black sand beach, and liquid brown eyes that look like the most beautiful tiger’s eye or agate you’ve ever seen. But the best thing is her laugh, her smile, the way she flaps her inquisitive five-year-old hands when excited.

It’s the work of a moment to pull up his photo gallery and offer the phone, hands trembling, to Springtrap. Maybe it will spare him. Maybe it will see that he’s just another guy trying to live his life and feed his daughter.

Springtrap’s mangled hands are surprisingly delicate and precise as it takes the phone. Something intangible changes about the animatronic’s posture. A certain look - sadness? - creeps into its glowing silver eyes. Dan’s eyebrows crease. He’d almost forgotten for a minute in his horror at seeing the thing so close. Did whoever got trapped inside the suit have a family of their own? Is he even actually talking to that person?

The animatronic says nothing further. It barely even moves for the rest of the night; just sits down on the floor and watches him after handing his phone back. Which is fine. Preferable, certainly, to being killed.

He just wishes the thing wasn’t so damn creepy.


	2. A Job, A Job, my kingdom for Another Job

If he could just find another job, that would be great. Seriously. Dan wants to live to be nice and old. Maybe, if he’s very lucky, to see his baby girl grow up to be a successful young woman.

For the time being, though, his entire future hinges on the mercy of a rotted animatronic.

When is Springtrap’s mercy going to run out? The question pushes its way into Dan’s mind unbidden every time he looks at Delilah. Every time he sits down to watch TV. It all seems so fleeting, like glimpses of sunlight glinting off the morning dew; you swear you’ll remember the image in your head forever, but it’s swept away or it could be swept away at any moment.

Huh. Dan sits in his car before work, staring at the garish sign hanging above the entryway. He takes a fortifying swig of Mountain Dew and hopes to hell that he’ll have enough caffeine to keep alert during the night.

He’s more prone to philosophical kinds of thoughts recently. Whether that’s good or bad, well, it seems a bit irrelevant to him right now. Perhaps this is all a really weird test from God or something. At this point Dan would believe just about anything - as long as he still has the breath in his body to keep going. Which isn’t guaranteed, with the way the ventilation keeps cutting out on him in there. The hallucinations are fast becoming the only way to tell whether something’s wrong or not.

Another odd thing is that in the three nights since he met and talked with Springtrap, the animatronic has evaded the view of the cameras. It’s also kept well clear of Dan’s office. He definitely doesn’t mind this - like he’s said before, the thing is creepy as all hell.

It’s strange, though. A part of him wonders if the thing is okay. Another part is waiting for the other shoe to drop, for it to get tired of skulking around and decide to kill him.

Just another reason to keep taking the job seriously. The last thing to do now is get complacent and stop watching the cameras. Also, that ventilation system. He should really recommend that the managers update them.

Fazbear’s Fright is creepy enough without an actual animatronic, Dan muses to himself. As he walks through the back entrance - which is actually supposed to be where customers exit the building - he’s confronted with a broken down old wreck. It seems to be Freddy himself, slumped against one wall, his eyes smashed out and his endoskeleton showing through where patches have been torn through his fabric covering.

How does Springtrap feel when it sees its fellow machines laying around like this? The managers have only been able to track down the heads of some. Like Chica. Dan shivers a little at the thought. Does that mean Springtrap sees the decapitated heads of its friends lying around as it wanders this facility?

Dan suspects that he might hide too if he was put in that position. Nothing he can do about it, though. So Dan turns to enter the security office, ready to start the night.

Unfortunately, as he turns around, he’s faced with a serious problem.

Springtrap is sitting on the floor directly opposite his chair. And at the sound of Dan’s entry, the animatronic’s head has turned to fix him with an unyielding silver-grey stare.

 **Fuck**. “Hi, there.”

It doesn’t move.

Dan sits down in his chair. **I need a better job**.

The glowing eyes that track his every movement seem like perfect proof.


	3. Life and Living

Despite his initial shock at seeing the animatronic sitting **right there** , Dan adjusts quickly enough. He can’t help it. Springtrap looks so weirdly nonthreatening leaning against the wall, its arms wrapped around its knees to draw them up close to its chest. As the hours tick slowly by, Dan wonders what it means to do. Maybe it wants to desensitize him to its presence, then see the betrayal in his eyes when it finally kills him.

No answer seems to be coming from Springtrap in the foreseeable future.

The night keeps ticking by.

Dan is about ready to start bombarding the animatronic with questions when he starts to notice how woozy he feels. Like he’s about to be sick, or pass out. Dark spots rapidly begin to blot out his vision, and he feels his heart thudding painfully against his ribs as he gulps air.

There just isn’t enough oxygen. Vision failing, gasping and choking, Dan groans weakly.

This is the end of the line for him. He wishes he could tell his daughter he loves her one last time. Even the effort of flipping up the maintenance panel is beyond him right now, though, so he doesn’t know how he would find the strength to hug Delilah.

Springtrap watches this odd human as he comes in and sits down, going about business as usual. Fazbear’s Fright has attracted people who could be called ‘odd’ before. That’s not the unusual part. Thrill-seekers and murder mystery nuts have flocked here by the dozens since this place opened years ago, a tribute to the place haunted by his victims so many years previous.

This man, however. This man is not afraid the way all the others were. Why is that? Even the thrill-seekers would get scared, seeing him for the first time in person.

Springtrap. He wonders why that name sounds so right. Somewhere during the years spent sitting there, rotting away in the pizzeria’s hidden room, it replaced his old name. Which is odd. He felt his body being removed from this suit at one point, and then later… he was still here.

A choking sound brings Springtrap’s attention back to the present. The guard he’s been watching is having trouble breathing, if the wheezing sound of his breath and his panicked, glazed expression is any indication.

Taking the diagnostic screen from the man’s hand, Springtrap stares at the blinking green words:

SYSTEM RESTART MENU:

audio devices

camera systems

ventilation **ERROR** <<<

His discolored, greenish-yellow fingers hover over the screen. A strange feeling comes over the animatronic. When he was human - when he was William Afton - he took lives. Children didn’t matter to him, apart from his own precious son. Perhaps it was even the fact that he’d taken those other children’s lives that made him so protective of his own…

So by all accounts, he shouldn’t care. Hell, he should be killing this man himself, not watching the man suffocate.

He used to take lives. Can he save them now?

Almost without his conscious consent, his finger taps the screen. The device chirps. The ventilation system reboots, and oxygen rushes back into the room.

Well, there’s no turning back now.

Dan comes back to himself and groans, rubbing his eyes. They feel tired, and it’s hard to focus on anything. Which, he supposes, is better than being dead.

Dead… the ventilation just failed! Who reset it?

As his vision becomes clear again he receives his answer. Instead of sitting against the far wall, Springtrap is looming over him again; the animatronic’s eyes are glowing as always, but there’s a spark of what Dan can only guess is concern in them.

“You saved my life.” It’s not a question.

The thing answers anyway:

“Yes.”


	4. Chapter 4

The next words on Dan’s lips are ‘But why?’. Before he can speak, Springtrap shakes its head and puts one finger over its mouth. _Shhh_. Don’t speak.

Dan is puzzled, but he does what the animatronic asks. It would be a shame to make it angry enough to kill him after all that’s happened so far. So he stays quiet, he remains sitting, and he tries not to do anything that could be viewed as antagonizing.

~

Well, this is interesting. Springtrap sinks back down into a seated position against the wall. He has no idea how to react to all of this.

What happened? It’s still shocking that he’s found this urge to protect a human being after so long. Nothing should be bonding him to this man. Nothing would have bonded him to this man in _life_ , when they were the same species.

Again and again. What has changed?

Breath. The strange rhythmic thumping of a heartbeat - slightly faster than a steady, relaxed pace. Dan is quiet, still looking at the cameras every so often. Dan. Springtrap wonders whether the name is short for something, or perhaps a nickname.

Then he hears a sharp inhale, the kind that means _startled_. Dan is staring into the camera feeds, and as Springtrap watches he notices that the man glances regretfully at his hip. Before, when he was a security guard, that meant one thing. _I want a gun right now_.

It’s trouble, then.

“Aw, hell,” Dan mutters, looking at the cameras again. The source of his worries becomes apparent roughly two seconds later, when a staccato _pop-pop_ sounds in the distance. “Bringing guns to a place like this? Are you kidding?”

No wonder the man was looking like he wished he had one. Humans and bullets generally do not mix.

And, even more worrying, the constant gas leaks aren’t exactly going to mix well with firearms. Even Springtrap turns and heads the other way when there’s a gas leak, wary of the possibility that some rogue spark created by his metal body could set something off.

“We have to go,” Dan decides, jerking the animatronic back to the present.

“We?”

He pauses. The sound of voices is soft, but getting louder. It won’t be more than a couple minutes before the intruders get to them.

Here goes nothing, Dan decides, and nods. “We. You saved my ass, I’m helping yours.”

Springtrap almost laughs at the strangeness of it all.

“Lead the way.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it's short, and it's been a while. Sorry guys! Trying to get back into my writing flow.

**Author's Note:**

> This is also posted on my writing blog at [dug-so-deep](dug-so-deep.tumblr.com) on tumblr. Please feel free to chat with me there as well as in the comments.


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